AP Photo/David J. Phillip Evacuees wade down a flooded section of Interstate 610 as floodwaters from Tropical Storm Harvey rise in Houston. A bsent an 11th-hour conversion, President Donald Trump, who believes that climate change is a Chinese hoax, is unlikely to concede that the warmer waters of the Gulf have played a role in the country’s worst hurricane since Katrina in 2005 and Sandy in 2012. He’s not likely to urge the climate-change deniers he’s placed atop the Environmental Protection Agency to change their tune. And if his climate denial were not enough, his stream-of-deranged-consciousness tweets in the hours as Harvey approached and made landfall continue to demonstrate his total unfitness for the office of presidency. Like New Orleans, Houston has always been a city at risk from hurricanes and tropical storms. Americans will debate for years to come who was responsible for what in the country’s fourth largest city. This much is known: Houston failed to prepare and was bound...

Trump speaks at a campaign rally in Prescott Valley, Arizona, on October 4, 2016. I f Donald Trump’s schedule holds, the latest chapter in the detestable saga of his presidency opens next week in Phoenix, where Trump is set to speak at a rally of his faithful, deranged followers. Despite public outrage, negative headlines, and many Republicans in Congress ever so faintly humming kumbaya, the president of the United States continues to revel in a perverse sort of post-Charlottesville euphoria that only he and his white-supremacist and neo-Nazi brethren can experience. As the president gleefully blabs and tweets his way to civil discord, Phoenix braces for the worst. Arizona’s two senators, Republicans John McCain and Jeff Flake, have excoriated him, while Greg Stanton, the city’s Democratic mayor, has asked him to stay away, to no avail so far. So the Tuesday rally could rip open angry wounds in a city still smarting from the excesses that S.B. 1070, the state’s harsh immigration law,...

AP Photo/Jim Cole The contents of an emergency opioid overdose kit are seen at the New Hampshire statehouse in Concord. The state began handing out free kits of the opioid antidote naloxone this fall to families and friends of people at risk of an opioid overdose in 2015. N ew Hampshire can be safely added to the encyclopedia of people, places, and things that the 45th president of the United States has publically insulted or, in the case of the Granite State, denigrated on the phone with foreign leaders. In his continuing desire to remind the world that Americans elected him and not Hillary Clinton to put his business acumen to work on drug abuse and trafficking across the southern border, he told Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto in late January, “I won New Hampshire because New Hampshire is a drug-infested den.” (As usual, Trump has a tenuous acquaintance with verifiable facts. He did win the first-in-the-nation Republican presidential primary but Clinton inched to victory in...

AP Photo/Brian Witte Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein speaks at the NAACP’s national convention in Baltimore. T hough few blacks believed that the much-vaunted post-racial America was anything more than media hyperbole, a black president nonetheless left the White House with a health-care legacy, a healthy approval rating, and a rock star patina that the hyper-partisanship of the nation’s capital failed to tarnish. His presidency may have contained few Rooseveltian moments but history will likely record that the country was stronger for his travails. The arc of the moral universe bent perhaps ever so imperceptibly toward justice during his tenure, but bend it did. Which is why, after the Obama interregnum, Donald Trump’s assault on civil rights has set many African Americans back on their heels. Nowhere was that sentiment more evident than at the NAACP’s annual convention in Baltimore this week, where two very different conceptions of what justice means for African Americans...